On 6 February 2020, the tanker SСF Angara, while en-route from the Port of Ust-Luga to Copenhagen, received a distress signal from the Russian fishing trawler Pongoma, which was sinking on the traverse of Tallinn, 26 nautical miles offshore. The tanker and the crew responded and rescued all seven members of the fishing vessel.
The tanker immediately responded to a request for help, and after the instructions received from the rescue centre in Tallinn, SCF Angara diverted to assist the ship in distress.
During a rescue operation, all seven members of Pongoma’s crew were successfully brought aboard the tanker. Two fishermen, in need of urgent medical care, were then evacuated by helicopter to Helsinki. The rest five crewmembers were airlifted to Tallinn by the Estonian rescue service.
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The management of SCF Group and the technical managers of the ship, SCF Management Services (Cyprus), expressed their gratitude to the shipmaster and the crew for their concerted efforts in saving lives in adverse weather conditions in the dark.
The crews of SCF vessels have assisted seafarers in distress in several occasions. In 2007, the crew of the LPG carrier SCF Tomsk rescued 41 people in the Atlantic Ocean 500 miles from the Cape Verde Islands. The rescued seafarers had been stranded in the open sea for over two weeks.
In 2008, the crew of the tanker SCF Khibiny saved 13 people from an Indonesian vessel that had sunk in the Straits of Malacca. In 2010, the tugboat Dobrynya participated in the rescue of nine fishermen swept into the Gulf of Finland on a detached ice floe.
In 2014, the crew of the tanker SCF Krasnodar saved six yachtsmen who had become stranded on a life raft in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil for several days. In 2016, the crew of the tanker Leonid Loza rescued ten people from a fishing trawler off the west coast of Africa.
In March 2019, a crew of the tanker SCF Surgut rescued 12 people from a yacht caught in a storm in the Caribbean Sea.
Finally, in November 2019, the crew of the supply vessel Gennadiy Nevelskoy rescued three fishermen in the Sea of Okhotsk.
